[News] Teen Suicide, Microsoft's Zune Pass and PsWhat?

Alrighty, so basically what I'm going to do is do a quick "summary rundown" of the news for the last couple of days on topics that stuck out to me and seemed important (to me, that is).

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Suicidal Tendencies?
The first topic at hand is regarding this poor 13 year old girl who committed suicide after being lead along through a fake MySpace profile that was created by an adult woman who worked for a schoolmate's mother. I know, sounds like drama, right? Well, the mother of the schoolmate is being prosecuted in the case as per the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I say, GOOD. It's ridiculous to think that when they didn't get what they wanted (a self-induced guilty admission of "spreading lies" about the schoolmate) that they went on to humiliate the young girl out of spite of the fact that the girl DIDN'T give them the information they wanted (they wanted her to talk shit about the schoolmate, then they were going to take that information to her mother and get her into trouble.).

Now, most people would say "Dude, I know you... Why do you give a shit?" Truth is, the woman posed as "a cute teenage boy [sic] " to trap this poor girl. Does this sound like anything else? Perhaps an older man posing as a young girl to trick young boys into meeting them, then bashing their heads in after raping the child? Perhaps this should be taken very seriously. Both instances result in the loss of human life. This woman should be made an example of. The worker who was coerced into creating the profile is apparently not part of the procedings (unless I missed something) but the mother of the schoolmate is and for good reason. Commiting identity fraud is serious business. Legally, a fraud is "a deception made for personal gain (perhaps but not necessarily at the expense of other parties)." I'd venture to guess that gathering incriminating evidence to use on the now dead girl is definitely personal gain.

We'll see how this plays out, I'm sure. I hope they don't let her off easy. The prosecution of the girl's death should be pushed as far as it can due to the fact that more and more youth are killing themselves over internet bullying (which this clearly turned into) and it's discusting to think that society wouldn't want to deal with that before it becomes even more of a problem.

I guess the reason why it even became important enough for me to talk about was because the defense attorney decided to take it upon himself to slide on down into the scum with the ambulance chasers and this is what followed:

"Ms. Drew’s defense lawyer, Dean Steward, carefully tried to unravel the credibility of Ms. Grills and others witnesses, including Megan’s mother, Christina Meier, whose testimony continued from Wednesday.

“Don’t you kind of have to say stuff they want to hear?” he said to Ms. Grills, motioning to prosecutors in a reference to her immunity agreement.

Mr. Steward suggested that Ms. Meier ought to have known better than to leave her daughter alone in her room after a nasty exchange of e-mail banter left the girl distraught. He said the antidepressant drugs her daughter had been taking were known to cause suicidal thoughts in teenagers.

“You let her run upstairs to the room alone,” Mr. Steward said to Ms. Meier." (NYTimes)

Dean Steward, you make me sick. I understand you are supposed to defend your client; however, putting the undue stress upon the grieving mother by trying to blame her for the death of her child when the negligence was CLEARLY with your client is disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself. Your professionalism is lacking and I honestly think you should be blacklisted.

If you'd like to read more on the story, click here.

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Zune, Zune, Zune
Do you even know what a Zune is? Most of you probably don't unless you've seen their very odd, very questionable commercials. Humorous yet slightly dirty/gritty/interesting? So Zune was a product put out by Microsoft as a response to Apple's iPod. Well, that's great and all; however, the works put up on the marketplace were riddled with DRM (digital rights management) that allows the company/companies to control when, where and how you can listen to the music you have gained access to. Now, this may sound like a bunch of crap. You might be saying "Look, I bought it and want to listen to it whenever I want." In a sense, you are both right and wrong. Without understanding how the subscription service with the Zune and its marketplace work, that would be a logical explanation. The twist comes with the fact that your $15 subscription fee gives you access to the music. It doesn't give you rights. Thus, you are basically paying to have access to the library and listen to it. Cancel your sub, you lose your access and thus the songs you thought you had "purchased" are no longer available to you. Standard subscription style services.

Now, the cool thing is with how they are making a modification to the Zune Pass. Apparently they are changing it to basically allow you to keep 10 songs a month for your 15 bucks. Pretty cool if you ask me. The twist is that you aren't really "buying" the tracks. You are pretty much renting them (This is something I thought of, and then apparently after doing more research was confirmed by Gizmodo.com).

Now, all of that is pointless information right? Nah, not really. The real trick is the hinting of Microsoft working with the production houses of the music and arranging to provide a majority of their content in DRM-free MP3 format. What does that mean? It means that if it's successful, and Microsoft sets up a "Napster-like" download system (i.e. You can download a single song or a whole album for a set fee. Sound familiar? Yeah. Apple borrowed this idea and implemented their own version of it for iTunes).

What to read more in-depth on the Zune or the changes being made? Here are a couple of links:

Zune Pass on Arstechnica.com
Zune Pass on Gizmodo.com

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PsTools
PsWhat? Yes, PsTools. To those of you who don't know what it is, hopefully I'll educate you. For those of you who do, rejoice in the glory that is remote administration. For those of you who aren't really into "tech" the least you can do is stick around for the rest of the blog after getting this far, right? :) Plus, I'll put some notes after specifics to keep you in-the-know enough to understand. I love teaching people new things and technology just happens to be my line of work.

Ok, so PsTools is a group of command line (remember the ugly, black & white window with nothing but text? Yeah, that thing) tools that allow you to do a myriad of administration functions. And guess what? I don't have to run around to each of the machines in order to do it! Now, to those of you who aren't admins this may seem a bit "lazy"; however, if you really stop to think about it and put it into context with your own work you can see how useful this is. This is what technology is all about, right? Efficiency.

What kinds of things can they do? Well, this is where the neatness comes in. Now, for an example, I did a google search for "random list of jobs" which came up with a neat little page that does exactly that... Pops up a single, random job that I could use as comparison for these features. The job that popped up for me was "baker."

So some of the features are things such as shutting down / executing processes (Think turning off/on the oven from the other side of the bakery), list detailed information about running processes (Imagine being able to walk into the bakery and immediately being able to tell that there are 15 loaves of white, 12 loaves of wheat and 10 loaves of sour-dough baking right now in the ovens as well as the ingredients that were put into the dough. All without having to go and open each of the oven doors and looking), viewing and controlling the services on the remote machine (similar to being able to adjust the ovens in question according to temperature, moisture, ingredients, etc.).

This may not sound like much at all... but when I have to go through and change the local administrator passwords for all of the systems on my network, and I don't want to have to force people to log off of their machines nor go around to each machine and make sure that I did indeed get to it during the password change, I get pleased. Soon we will all have home networks that run our refridgerators, freezers, thermostat, televisions, stereos and such. We'll all be using a single remote control (or remote control panel on the wall) to control these things. This is much like that but generation 1. :)

Interested in learning more about PsTools? Here's a link to the site that you can download it from. There is really limited information, so go peruse the forums as there are plenty of Qs and As there for more information!